MS IPTV is lovely, says MS IPTV chap

Check the 150ms channel change on that...

There are two ways to view the Microsoft IPTV system. Microsoft’s way and the wrong way. For those of us that have dealt with Microsoft in the past, this is not an abnormal positioning.

“Ours is the only end to end IPTV solution which includes all aspects of IPTV from content ingestion to the consumer device,” is the boast of Ed Gracyzk, director of marketing and communications for Microsoft’s TV division. Some people might see that as the only closed, monopolistic technology you would never control. But that would be the wrong view.

“Telcos either use us or they can use point to point products and hope that they will work together and hope that they will scale,” said Gracyzk.

Faultline openly blanched at the word “scale” used in this way. The scaling issue has been cleverly turned around. Gracyzk has managed to suggest that it is other IPTV solutions, not Microsoft’s that have problems scaling, despite the fact that some of the other systems are already working in prime time in systems heading towards one million customers. The Microsoft interpretation is that other systems don’t scale. The other (wrong) interpretation that people might place on this situation is that it’s Microsoft IPTV, that has yet to prove it can scale.

But he believes his point. You can tell, Gracyzk really thinks that none of the competition have been tested at the levels that Microsoft is expecting its system to work at, and there is some kind of crazy logic about that.

“Do you really think that companies like SBC Communications, British Telecom or Swisscom would spend that kind of money ($400m from SBC, the others have not yet revealed their spend) if they didn’t think it would scale to millions of customers?”

Well if he asks that, then no, Faultline certainly believes those companies fully expect it to scale. But that expectation, from senior management, not the engineers, in a telco, is not, in its own right, proof that Microsoft IPTV will scale. Whereas the operational system at Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, has scaled.

That’s right Faultline finally got its long awaited call from Microsoft, so that Microsoft could put to rights some of the “misconceptions,” that Faultline has published. For misconceptions, read quoting to the competition.

But in the end, after an hour of probing, buried among all the posturing, and suggestions that everything that was said by others about Microsoft’s IPTV was “either totally confused or outright lies,” we managed only to scrape together a few new facts about just how the Microsoft IPTV software works, but we’ll share with you what we managed to eke out.

150 millisecond dash

“Our channel change takes 150 milliseconds,” is the claim that Gracyzk made. Which is fine, but he said he cannot go into how this is achieved except to say that it is “technology we are patenting.” A long perusal at the US patent office revealed nothing of this, but then again there are rather a lot of patents waiting to go under Microsoft’s name.

“I can confirm that it uses both multicast and unicast protocols,” said Gracyzk, but would go no further. “It’s all done in software, we do not use a hardware tuner (who does?). It is achieved through a combination of client and server software and the network operator can configure this to their particular needs, with a lot of flexibility.” Is that IGMP multicast? “I’m not sure,” says Gracyzk, “I’ll get back to you.”

Faultline has already explained how we think the channel change works, with a server sending the required I-Frame data rapidly to a set top that changes channel, and then once ready, it switches over to the multicast protocol. This burst of unicast data may also be used to fill the set top buffer at high speed. Once the I-Frame has arrived, other frame data can now be accurately interpreted. This process saves up to 500 milliseconds which might be wasted in waiting for the next I-Frame. So is there a server dedicated to channel change?

“In our IPTV we use multiple server types and a lot of what has been written about us is blatantly wrong. The suggestion that you published that Microsoft software can only support three households per server is completely wrong. We can support 100s of households per server configuration,” said Gracyzk (Not per server, but for every complete configuration of server types).

Again Faultline invited an explanation. What are the server types? Is one dedicated to channel change, one for VoD. What else? The only server type Gracyzk mentioned was an acquisition server and this is the first stopping off point once the content leaves the head end, and this server, he says, is responsible for service delivery.

On the Microsoft TV website it shows a diagram with both a broadcast acquisition server and a VoD acquisition server, so there are in fact two such devices in the networks. There are also separately a VoD server and a Broadcast server, although how these differ from the acquisition versions of the same name is difficult to tell. In fact with just a web diagram and a refusal to go into the detail, the only way that anyone can understand Microsoft technology is to listen to competitors, who have listened, in turn, to customers that have heard the full pitch.

In the diagram there is also a notification server, and a server which links to the billing and OSS system; there’s a subscriber and system store, an application server, presumably for integration with other new applications, and a server that acts as a client gateway. Do all of these have to be servers running Microsoft operating systems.

“Well, yes because that’s what the software is written for. Our servers talk to other servers, which can be Linux or Unix, for instance, for billing and customer management, but our software doesn’t run on anything else.”

Spot the server

There is, of course, a server where encryption is introduced for the Windows Media DRM, which issues and manages keys. Though we’re not sure which one, perhaps the client gateway, because this has a little wall in front of it in the web diagram.

“One of the benefits of our system, and a key reason for telcos choosing our products is that our DRM gives us such a huge advantage. This is because it extends beyond the TV and the set top to home networks, tablet PCs, portable video players and even the mobile phone.

“None of these operators are looking at this as a stand alone business. For the first time the TV speaks the same language as other devices.” Once again this idea that Gracyzk has said something that means one thing to him and another to the rest of the world begins to emerge. He seems to think that a world where Telcos either define or provide PCs and PDAs is both likely and acceptable.

And also previously all TV content could be easily copied to external devices, unless a Pay TV system had a conditional access system that stopped it.

Most CA systems have stopped short of interfering with the recording of programs on DVD recorders to view later, although sometimes the CA stops recording of pay per view. So suddenly, in the new telco world, consumers may have to buy devices that have Microsoft DRM clients in them or they won’t be able to do what they always have been able to do, copy programming. So in this way telcos, and ultimately content businesses, will choose customer devices.

Gracyzk points this out. It’s not Microsoft that will make that decision, but the content owner and the operator between them.

But the more that Microsoft DRM clients proliferate, the less likely it is that Microsoft will feel the need to interoperate with other DRM systems. And if there is no interoperability, then another Microsoft monopoly will emerge almost over night. And with that monopoly, there will be all the legal trouble that Microsoft has had before. The humble iPod will not be able to get access to any music downloaded from Microsoft IPTV and presumably the same will be true of any future video iPod or anything like it, such as the humble DVD Recorder or DVR player. They will all pay homage to Microsoft or have their options limited.

Now all of this may be exactly what the content owner has in mind, the end of free personal use copying, or at least a shift to copying under the control of a DRM. But we’ve been contacted by 1,000s of consumers that go to a lot of trouble to buy systems that do not restrict their personal use rights, and any system that did is likely to become rapidly boycotted.

Of course Apple might always license Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM, but that would rather defeat its existing strategy, which is equally proprietary. When we put it to Gracyzk that the DRM licensing market could become a license business worth several $1bn, and that to Microsoft, this was in fact the main aim of the game, he simply said, “No, our aim is to make money out of selling the IPTV platform, and our DRM license terms are on our web site,” which didn’t entirely contradict the idea.

Microsoft DRM licensing is very low, and there is almost certainly a major issue in it even issuing DRM licenses. It has acknowledged, by its legally enforced payment to Intertrust, that it does not own all the patents within its DRM, so it cannot effectively license them to a third party, not unless someone pays Intertrust.

But even if DRM licensing from Microsoft is low priced now, we could point out that it used to charge very little for its operating system, but that’s managed to inflate over the years, so why not DRM license fees? And besides CE manufacturers would have to pay for the codec license, the DRM license and the media format, if they happen to develop on anything that is not a Microsoft operating environment.